I think programmers are very good at fighting through frustration and pain, because so much of the job is just bad existing software, or libraries we don't cont

I think programmers are very good at fighting through frustration and pain, because so much of the job is just bad existing software, or libraries we don't control, or legacy code we don't have time to refactor etc. And so when something feels off in Emacs, your natural reaction is the same as when something is off in Word, on on your smartphone, or whatever. You just swallow your pride and live with it. It's hard to truly internalise that this isn't necessary in Emacs, that you can actually achieve a level of productivity and proficiency with elisp that the moment something annoys you, you can and should just fix it once and for all. That discipline is hard in any codebase, but it's especially hard with your editor that you don't really think of as just a pile of code that you are personally charged with maintaining. To an extent much of Unix is like this. In the early days it's exhausting and can be overwhelming - so much stuff seems suboptimal to your workflow and almost infinite customisability feels like a bit of a Fuck You when you just want to get stuff done. But then you realise you've had Linux installed for more than 20 years and there's stuff you could have fixed in your teens and never thought of again. At some point you should really just commit.